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Chopin Saved Jews From The Nazis?

Indirectly anyways, the composer Frederic Chopin helped save at least one Jewish family from an untimely fate during the Holocaust: Jozefa Tracz devised an ingenious early-warning system to save the Jewish family hidden in the attic: the 15-year-old played the … Read More

Indirectly anyways, the composer Frederic Chopin helped save at least one Jewish family from an untimely fate during the Holocaust:

Jozefa Tracz devised an ingenious early-warning system to save the Jewish family hidden in the attic: the 15-year-old played the piano in the living room, banging hard on the keys, every time a stranger entered her house in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Her Chopin drowned out the voices of the fugitives upstairs. Yesterday, Ms Jozefa Czekag-Tracz had a tearful reunion with one of the women she saved. "They knew the risk they were taking," said Miriam Schmetterling, now 82, talking of the Tracz family. "If someone had found out we were there, they would have been killed."

Ms Schmetterling, who was 18 at the time, has returned to Poland, together with 60 Holocaust survivors, for the first time since 1946.